On British general election nights, I like to watch Dish and Dishonesty, the first episode of the third series of Blackadder. It pokes some gentle fun at the conventions of election night TV, including the tradition of ‘silly’ candidates. In the episode, Ivor ‘Jest Ye Not, Madam’ Biggun of the Standing at the Back Dressed Stupidly and Looking Stupid party is among the challengers to replace the late Sir Talbot Buxomly.
It all feels very tired. Exhausted, even
Mr Biggun – whose policies of compulsory asparagus for breakfast and free corsets for the under-fives will doubtless be in the next Lib Dem manifesto – is an unsubtle parody of the Monster Raving Loony party and their various imitators and competitors. You see them milling around on the stage at the counts, wearing outlandish costumes and often looking inordinately pleased with themselves. In 2017, a photograph of then-Prime Minister Theresa May standing awkwardly on stage with Lord Buckethead at the Maidenhead council headquarters went viral online and was the occasion of much comment about the glorious eccentricities of British democracy.
Lord Buckethead – originally a character from an obscure 1980s Star Wars spoof, Hyperspace – was the alter ego of a comedian, Jon Harvey. After a complaint from the director of Hyperspace, Harvey reinvented himself as Count Binface (subsequently another crazy funster obtained permission to use Lord Buckethead and used it support the People’s Vote campaign for a second Brexit referendum). Harvey / Count Binface is a candidate for this week’s London mayoral election, having garnered a respectable 20,000 votes in 2021, and recently released a not very side-splitting video outlining his platform.
I’m sure plenty of people find this all very funny, an example of the Great British Sense of Humour. To me, it feels very laboured, the kind of knowingly ‘zany’ performance which you expect from sixth-formers and undergraduates who have watched too much Monty Python. Years ago I went to see the Oxford Revue, and it was agonisingly unfunny – heavily reliant on painfully forced surrealism. It took me a long time to work out why it had fallen on its backside so resoundingly. I eventually realised that it was the self-consciousness of the gags that caused them to fail. Very few things are more fatal to a funny line landing as intended than the sense that the speaker or writer is very impressed with themselves and their own (real or imagined) cleverness. This was part of the reason why the much-lauded 2016 public vote to name a new British Antarctic Survey ship Boaty McBoatface was so unfunny; you just knew that everyone voting for the silly name was congratulating themselves on how unconventional and hilarious they were. The same applies to Count Binface, and all the other men who get up on stage in brightly coloured clothes advocating for free taxi rides to the Moon or turning the M1 into a children’s play area because they are just so incredibly wacky, unlike the rest of us boring squares.
On top of this, these characters’ self-presentation as subversive outsiders strikes a false note because they rarely have any kind of genuine antagonism towards the status quo. Now the obvious response to that point is that they are jesters, not politicians, they’re here to have a laugh. Other people can tackle the big problems. But this is not quite satisfactory. For one thing, by entering the political arena, even with an obviously comedic platform and persona, they are inviting disagreement and riposte. If their only aim is to expose ‘the system’ as laughable, that is itself a political position on which they can expect pushback.
We are entitled to draw certain conclusions about the ultimate aim of absurdist political gestures, if those gestures always point in a certain direction. Jon Harvey’s 2017 incarnation of Lord Buckethead and 2019’s continuity Lord Buckethead (David Hughes) were both supporters of Remain, a cause very dear to the heart of the British establishment in those strange febrile years after 2016. Buckethead Mk. II planned to stand against Nigel Farage in the 2019 European elections, before withdrawing so as not to split the pro-EU vote. Both Buckethead and Binface stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and West Ruislip in 2019. How enormously daring and edgy!
Like the Monster Raving Loonies, these men see themselves as engaged in the noble endeavour of satire, and of course the right to mock those in power is hugely important. Laughter is a strong weapon against pomposity and arbitrary authority. But 60 years on from the satire boom of the 1960s, political comedy is at a low ebb, at least in its traditional forms. The gags and their subjects all feel stale and well-worn. Radio 4 and panel shows are full of the same faces and voices, all making more or less the same student union-level political jokes about the allegedly uptight and bigoted right-wing bourgeoisie and posh Tories grinding the faces of the poor and single mothers.
It all feels very tired. Exhausted, even. The problem for Count Binface and others is that Monty Python and Private Eye and the alternative comedians won. The old Britain they mocked so enthusiastically has indeed vanished under the rubble, and the new breed of comics do not really know what to do next, except bomb the rubble. They are basically happy with the contemporary cultural settlement, so their material has no bite. I would bet anyone any money that if you asked Jon Harvey – the man behind the bin – about his politics, it would be the same blend of progressive orthodoxy and big state Sensibleism as almost every other comedian.
Comments